Zema distorts data in proposal to ban online betting.
Romeu Zema promised, this Tuesday (August 18th), that his first act as president would be to ban all betting houses in Brazil. The statement was made in São Paulo, at a meeting with women whose family members were harmed by online gambling. To support the proposal, the Novo party candidate cited numbers that BNLData verified, and the result compromises the factual basis of the argument.
The figures presented by Zema are not supported by scientific or official sources. The candidate claimed there were "180 suicide attempts" motivated by gambling and "almost 10 million people vulnerable to addiction" in Brazil, without indicating the origin of either figure.
What do the real numbers say?
BNLData obtained, through the Access to Information Law (LAI), that Brazil has 30,9 million gamblers. Applying the highest rate recognized by international scientific literature to this base, the calculation arrives at a radically different number from that cited by the candidate.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that gambling disorder affects between 1,2% and 1,4% of the exposed adult population. A meta-analysis published in The Lancet Public Health put that percentage at 1,41%. Applying the higher estimate to the 30,9 million Brazilian gamblers, the country may have around 435 people with problematic behavior, but not 10 million.
The difference is of an order of magnitude that is difficult to ignore. Zema's number is more than 20 times higher than the WHO estimate. For this to be true, Brazil would have a gambling addiction rate 23 times higher than the world average, which would imply that 1 in 3 gamblers (32,4%) have a gambling disorder. This percentage is unparalleled in any substance or addictive behavior studied, not even alcohol, whose rate of use disorder is widely documented and yet much lower.
The arithmetic of suicides
The claim of "180 suicide attempts" linked to the BETs faces two simultaneous problems: lack of source and contradiction with official Ministry of Health data.
The Mortality Information System (SIM) recorded 16.462 completed suicides in 2022/2023, compared to 10.533 in 2013. The Notifiable Diseases Information System (SINAN) counted between 120 and 40 to 50 suicide attempts in the same comparative periods. In a five-year period, from 2018 to 2022, SINAN accumulated 556.152 notifications of self-inflicted injuries.
Attributing 180 cases exclusively to online gambling would require a causal correlation study that traced the specific motivation behind each occurrence. Such a study does not exist. Furthermore, global and national studies indicate that between 90% and 95% of people who died by suicide had some pre-existing psychiatric disorder, often undiagnosed or without adequate treatment.
The risk of inflating the problem.
When presenting this data in São Paulo, Zema included it in a speech that equates gambling addiction with drug addiction. "We have a very serious problem in Brazil today, and it seems to me that the authorities have turned a blind eye," said the former governor of Minas Gerais. For him, it is "a problem as serious as drug addiction, perhaps even worse in some aspects."
The proposed ban would come via presidential decree. “Suspend the operation of all betting shops here. Through a decree, the president has the power to do what is right,” Zema stated. “If someone is supplying poison to the population, first you stop supplying the poison, then you'll see the solution to that.”
Gambling disorder is, in fact, a recognized public health problem. What the BNLData analysis challenges is not the existence of the problem, but the magnitude attributed to it by the candidate. By inflating the numbers 20 times, the discourse compromises the debate on evidence-based solutions, such as regulatory adjustments or awareness campaigns.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If 180 suicide attempts were truly attributable to gambling, this data would be recorded in the Ministry of Health's systems and would prompt immediate action from health authorities. The absence of this record in official databases is, in itself, a warning sign about the solidity of the argument and the construction of false narratives.
View this photo on Instagram
